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Noted in Passing – why I write this blog

February 23, 2013

A few weeks ago I started a “Noted in Passing” feature which I hoped would become a regular weekly post with interesting links to other sites about subjects I did not have time to blog about. I find I have now missed a couple of weeks and a weekly post is going to be too onerous and this will now become an occasional feature.

However my failure to be able to keep up the weekly feature led me to review why I actually write this blog and I find that:

  1. I write primarily for myself on any and all topics that interest me and this interest varies over time and with my reading.
  2. I write when time allows and my posts reduce when I am on assignment or if I am travelling abroad.
  3. My posts here increase in frequency when I get “stuck” with my other writing projects but I find that just writing a blog post can often “relieve” the “writer’s block”. (And that I think is because a blog post is not directed at anyone in particular but my other writing is).
  4. I have no commercial interests or consequences connected with this site.
  5. Posts that are vaguely connected to my “6,000 Generations” project are posted on that site – sometimes with a link from this site.
  6. Sometimes what starts out as a blog post then becomes a longer essay which moves into one of my other projects.
  7. I don’t have any particular target profile of my readers because my own views seem to cut across all traditional religious and political boundaries and are often “politically incorrect”.
  8. Where I have actively formed an opinion it is the only opinion of consequence – for me. A consensus view – on anything – is inherently worthy of suspicion. Democracy has no place in science.
  9. I look at blog statistics from time to time but I  find I am not much motivated to “tailor” my posts in response to the statistics. (Typically this site has 400-500 visitors per day – 300 over the weekend – and occasionally a few thousand with 5,000 visitors being the peak for a single day).
  10. I have no political ambitions even though I am quite certain that if everybody agreed with me, all the world’s problems would be solved.
  11. I am content to observe and have no desire to be an “activist”, a “do-gooder” or “unprofessional” (which – it should be obvious – are the 3 most insulting epithets I can imagine).

So this blog is just a place for letting off steam, for getting my thoughts in order, for keeping my writing flowing and generally for developing my own views in areas that are relatively new to me. It is merely an extension of my space in the world – for good or ill.

When posts are of sufficient interest to attract many (or even any) readers then that is just an added bonus.

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Noted in Passing 9th February 2013

February 9, 2013

A weekly post on things that were interesting or which I would have liked to have blogged about …….

Science and Behaviour

The Fonseca Bust

Hair-dos and archaeology come together in an intriguing article in the Wall Street Journal which shows that there is a logic to hair styling.

MIT research suggests that India joined with Asia 10 million years later than previously thought while Caltech research indicates that that iron melts at higher temperatures than has been reported in the past and that the earth’s core more be a trifle warmer than has been assumed before.

257,885,161–1, which is also the 48th  Mersenne prime, was discovered on the computer of Dr. Curtis Cooper, a professor at the University of Central Missouri.

Global warming hard-liners are having to accept that the world isn’t warming as quickly as their catastrophe theories suggest. But they are not yet giving up on their religious beliefs about the anthropogenic causes of warming. But some more of the alarmism around global warming has to be recanted or at least toned down as new studies show that the Amazon rain forest is far more resilient to climate change than the doomsayers would have us believe.  Back in 1975 when the catastrophe theory of the day was the imminent cooling of the world, there were suggestions that the Arctic should be melted to try to get the world to warm up!!

Apparently certain certain volatile organic gases can promote cloud formation in a way  never considered before by atmospheric scientists. So much for “settled” climate science.

Pain and itching are both sensations which have a protective purpose and are linked to survival. Itching warns of the presence of irritants and it may be that there are a specific set of nerve cells that signal itch but not pain.

Flocking starlings strike an optimal balance between the work of responding to social cues from their neighbors and the need to conserve energy. They do this by coordinating with their seven nearest neighbors and form their characteristic flocks with the least effort.

Sweden is not immune to discrimination against job-seekers who have “foreign” names.

Amherst College seems to be taking sexual violence on campus seriously……

Engineering and Technology

The oil shale boom is having unexpected benefits even for rural banking in addition to changing the face of energy supplies.

The origin of the battery fire that occurred on a Japan Airlines (JAL) 787 at Boston Logan Airport in January has been identified as a single cell in a lithium-ion battery cell. Now the causes of the initiating short-circuit have to be found.

Meanwhile, Boeing has started telling its customers to expect serious delivery delays for the Boeing 787 as far out as this summer.

Bad Science

A mediocre academic, Brett Mills, seeks publicity by claiming that David Attenborough is minimising the prevalence of gay animals!

Earthworms are long revered for their beneficial role in soil fertility, but with the good comes the bad: they also increase greenhouse gas emissions from soils.

The Japanese Education Ministry is eyeing stricter penalties for researchers who misuse public research funds or commit fraud.

Last week, a California woman filed a lawsuit against Pfizer, the maker of Zoloft, alleging that Zoloft works no better than placebo, that Pfizer knew it, and that the company has run a systematic campaign to deceive doctors and the public in order to continue selling the drug.

 

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Noted in Passing 2nd February 2013

February 2, 2013

A weekly post on things that were interesting or which I would have liked to have blogged about …….

Science and Behaviour

GUINEA WORM--THIS ONE copy 2

Exercitationes de Vena Medinensis et de Vermiculis capillaribus infantium by G. H. Velschius (1674)

It seems that human infestation by guinea worms is sharply down pointing to the success of the program to eradicate them. Carl Zimmer writes an obituary for this creature which will not be missed (by humans) if it becomes extinct. But why is it that the intentional eradication of species inimical to man is perfectly OK, but the demise of other species which have failed to adapt and can no longer compete is considered a catastrophic loss of bio-diversity? In genetic survival terms the guinea worm or the mosquito might well be more important than tigers or panda bears.

There are those who would swear that the science of climate is well understood and settled. But it seems we know very little about clouds indeed and that bacteria which survive in the upper atmosphere could be one source for the nucleation of clouds.  In the same vein, it seems that irrigation in one area can cause storms elsewhere. A new study shows that agricultural irrigation in California’s Central Valley doubles the amount of water vapor pumped into the atmosphere, ratcheting up rainfall and powerful monsoons across the interior Southwest.

The British Museum and the Smithsonian teamed up to prove that their two crystal skulls, purportedly made by Aztecs in Mexico prior to Columbus’ arrival. are actually fakes. 

Kim Ryholt shows that in the ancient Egyptian city Tebtunis, 2,200 years ago, people voluntarily entered into slave contracts with the local temple for all eternity and they even paid a monthly fee for the privilege.

New findings suggest that free-ranging cats are likely the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for US birds and mammals.

Dienekes suggests that even with a generations long selective breeding program to select for Neanderthal genes, achieving a 100% Neandertal might be impossible.

Engineering and Technology

NASA will use the International Space Station that to test expandable space habitat technologyand will test a Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM), which is scheduled to arrive at the space station in 2015 for a two-year technology demonstration.

As they become easier to acquire and use, one of the obvious benefits of 3D printers is their ability to distribute the tools of production and manufacturing to the masses. But what they’re used to produce can create legal, regulatory, and even ethical concerns.

The PowerBuoy is a “smart” ocean-going buoy that uses piston-like motion in the float relative to its stationary spar to mechanically convert energy into electricity as it rides the waves.

Bad Science

The status of Harvard College’s investigation of student cheating has been distributed to faculty, staff and students by Arts and Science Faculty Dean Michael D. Smith.

Academics at the Institute for the Study of Coherence and Emergence are at war with an anthropologist at University of California at Berkeley and alleging that he stole ideas. Needless to say the UC Berkeley investigation report exonerates their own.

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia’s national science agency, may face further scrutiny into accusations of bullying and harassment of scientists and other employees.

Funding agencies may be paying out duplicate grants, according to an analysis by Harold R. Garner, Lauren J. McIver and Michael B. Waitzkin.

Forbes dumps on the unfortunate Lisa Jackson.

With the rapid growth of misconduct cases, scientific rehabilitation may have to become a necessary tool for research-integrity offices.

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Noted in Passing 26th January 2013

January 26, 2013

A weekly post on things that were interesting or which I would have liked to have blogged about …….

Science and Behaviour

Half a million DVDs of data could be stored in gram of DNA according to Harvard researchers. Unfortunately the credibility of the claim is severely impaired since this comes from the lab of Dr. George Church of Neanderthal baby fame and I have to take even the memory claim with a large bushel of salt. Dr. Church seems very keen on publicity just now. (This item almost made it to the Bad Science category but the memory item gets the benefit of the doubt). The Neanderthal nonsense was taken down comprehensively by Svante Pääbo and others of the  Neanderthal Genome Project.

Protons are 4% smaller than was thought and new particles are expected to be found.

Ferdinand Balfoort posts on Stockholm’s violent past from the peaceful present and a New Zealander is causing waves with his campaign to rid his country of cats.

One hundred and one year old Fauja Singh will run his last marathon in Hong Kong in February just before his 102’nd birthday, but plans to continue running for 4 hours a day.

Scrolls of 2,000 year old Buddhist texts have been found  preserved on long rolls of birch-tree bark and written in Gandhari.

Against conventional wisdom earthquakes can occur even at zones considered stable and this is what may have happened in 2011 when the magnitude 9.0 Tohoku-Oki earthquake was followed by a devastating tsunami.

Alarmist conservationists would like us to believe that humans are on the verge of causing a catastrophic loss of biodiversity but as with most alarmist dogmas, extinction rates of species are not as bad as has been assumed.

We all believe to some extent that looks reveal  traits and humans have been associating facial features with criminality for at least 2,000 years  (“Cassius has a lean and hungry look”) and “scientifically” for at least 300 years. But a new study debunks some of the myths.

Comet ISON was discovered by Russian astronomers Vitali Nevski and Artyom Novichonok in Sept. 2012. It bears the name of their night-sky survey program, the International Scientific Optical Network and NASA reckons it could be spectacularly visible in broad daylight this year.  On Nov. 28, 2013, this “dirty snowball” will fly through the sun’s atmosphere little more than a million km from the stellar surface and if it survives it could be a grand display.

Are Asians disadvantaged in US academia and industry? Lilian Gomory Wu and Wei Jing think so. The makings of some new urban myths lies in that those who multi-task are least capable of multi-tasking.

Engineering and Technology

Being blinded by the sun low in the sky is a pretty common hazard while driving here during winter in Scandinavia. But the development of Haptic steering wheels which vibrate could help solve this problem until cars are built that drive themselves (and they are closer than one might think).

French car manufacturer PSA Peugeot  Citroen believes it can put an air- powered vehicle on the road by 2016. The system works by using a normal internal combustion engine, special hydraulics and an adapted gearbox along with compressed air cylinders that store and release energy. This enables it to run on petrol or air, or a combination of the two.

A team of scientists from Scotland and the Czech Republic has created a “tractor” beam – a la Star Trek – which for the first time allows a beam of light to attract objects.

Materials science has always been in symbiosis with the other sciences at the transition from science to engineering and the discovery of metamaterials which can bend light, X-rays and radio waves promise a wide array of new applications in radio communications, security and automotive safety and now in imaging.

Bad Science

Paul Brookes was forced to take down his Science Fraud website last week after receiving legal threats (from some who later retracted – or had retracted – the papers that ScienceFraud exposed). Now he is marshalling support to open a new web-site to expose bad science.

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) is accused of bowing to political pressure in a study of bee decline which implicates some specific insecticides. The insecticide manufacturers are not amused.

A study on the impact of banning affirmative action (a pseudonym of course for discrimination) seems not only misguided but also one with a high level of confirmation bias. It looks like advocacy posing as science.

Geoffrey K. Pullum takes bad science backed up by bad journalism at the New Scientist and the Washington Post severely to task.

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Noted in Passing 19th January 2013

January 19, 2013

A weekly post on things that were interesting or which I would have liked to have blogged about …….

Engineering and Technology

A work of genius: Harry Beck's map of 1933

A work of genius: Harry Beck’s map of 1933

The London Underground is 150 years old and the iconic London Underground Map is a work of some genius – by an electrical draughtsman Harry Beck – in focusing on connections and ignoring geography.

Boeing is facing a torrid time with the 787 Dreamliner and has stopped all further aircraft deliveries. This is going to hurt their cash flow even before all the claims from the airlines come in for the grounding of their aircraft.

The advent of hydraulic fracturing and the consequent availability of shale gas means that new lines are drawn on the energy map of the world and many of the oldest and most stable geopolitical truths will be turned on their heads.

If graphene turns out to be the wonder material that it promises to be then it is time to invest in graphite.

Science and Behaviour

The dangers with blindly assuming that correlations represent a causal relationship is well demonstrated by this study on milk, chocolate and Nobel prizes. Derby Proctor believes that chimpanzees have a sense of fairness but her “ultimatum game” experiments were not strictly ultimate games at all and are not convincing.  Altruism among chimpanzees is – if it exists at all – strictly limited and only after basic needs are satisfied and restricted to a very few.

Matt Ridley joins the list and also dumps on Mark Lynas and green orthodoxy

The curious case of Zuma’s deputies deals with the intricacies of politics in South Africa and in the ANC today. An interesting post on the French need to be relevant in the world and Hollande’s adventures in Africa.

How much of the chatter on Twitter or postings on Facebook are real communication and how much is noise? Nandana Sengupta looks at the pluses and the minuses of the explosion of opinions via social media in India.

Having spent a lifetime with contracts I have always taken “terms” of “terms and conditions” to signify “limits of time” but terms and conditions have now converged in usage to be almost identical in meaning.

On where Tolkien may have found the word “hobbit”.

For Wodehouse fans and for the first time since Ralph Richardson as Lord Emsworth in 1967, BBC are showing a  new TV series centred around Blandings Castle. The reviews were not very kind:

“The performances weren’t bad exactly, but there was an impression that the cast had raided the charity shop and were merely having a spiffing time in vintage clothing.”

Bad Science

Michael Marotta describes four books on bad science.

The British Met Office makes yet another misstep and demonstrates that massaging science to get a desired result makes for bad science.

Climate models are hardly worth the paper they are printed on and they don’t seem to have any idea of how to handle the effect of clouds. Models – which are pushing the alarmist cause – generally assume they have a positive feedback on global warming but in reality the feedback is negative.

Professor Debora Weber-Wulff reports on Multiple Retractions of Articles by Computer Science Professor

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Noted in Passing 12th January 2013

January 12, 2013

My hope is to make “Noted in Passing” a regular, weekly post but I am not sure if I will have the discipline to maintain it. I shall try to confine myself to 3 topic areas: “Science and Behaviour”, “Engineering and Technology” and “Bad Science”. I’m trying to avoid politics as a topic in its own right but politics may well creep in under “Behaviour”.

Science and Behaviour

Polar bear numbers world-wide are up and here’s  a marvellous image of a polar bear in winter.

polar bear aurora_borealis_3-t2 free

Polar bear and the aurora borealis (from polar bear science)

Some people apparently believe that  too much genetic information could be a bad thing. Virginia Hughes disagrees strongly and I am inclined to agree with her. Genetic sequencing is here to stay and even if interpretation may lead to new challenges and new dilemmas, this genie cannot be stuffed back into the bottle.

Why did our fingers eveolve wrinkles? Was it perhaps to better be able to grip smooth objects?

John Hawks begins his descent through Darwin’s Descent of Man and has posted his “introduction” which is fascinating and – especially for a layman like me – eminently readable. “Experts” in my opinion are those who explain and not those who try to mystify (usually to inflate their own egos).

David McNeil believes that a gesture-speech unity lies at the origins of language but I am not convinced. When speech began – and that is a story in itself – gestures may well have added to man’s vocabulary but I am skeptical as to the role of gesture in the development of language and the grammar associated with language. But what seems obvious to me is that for the origins of speech as well as the origins of language we have to look to the increasing need for communication as the driving force.

In the meantime miR-941 is now being slated as a specific gene that contributed to how early humans developed tool use and language (in contrast to the FoxP2 gene which is thought to be a more general enabler). A study by psychologists claims that language learning begins before birth but I think they jump far too quickly from sound recognition to language learning and the study does not convince.

Recent excavations at an Australian site provides evidence of inhabitation ” certainly” at 41,230 years ago with the dating of charcoal found at the site. However the earliest inhabitation was much older since stone tools were found in deeper layers than the charcoal, but these have yet to be dated. This seems more consistent with the main human expansion Out of Africarabia first happening before Toba.

Even bloggers on the right are questioning the US love affair with semi-automatic weapons but I don’t expect any significant change to the gun laws in the US anytime soon.

Good grief! Greg Laden believes that summer in the Southern Hemisphere must be a sign of global warming. It’s -6°C outside my window right now and its been snowing in Jerusalem and the Lebanon, so I suppose the Northern Hemisphere must be entering a Little Ice Age.

The luminosity of our Sun varies just 0.1% over the course of its 11-year solar cycle. There is, however, a dawning realization among researchers that even these apparently tiny variations can have a significant effect on terrestrial climate. Tony Phillips from NASA comments on  “The Effects of Solar Variability on Earth’s Climate”  issued by the National Research Council.

Engineering and Technology

The technology for drones that today are used to kill could have more peaceful purposes. A Dronenet for a human free package delivery service  is attractive and does not sound so absurd.

Livefist reports that Airbus has beaten out the Russians to win the Indian Air Force’s new generation of  mid-refuelling tankers while Boeing is still going through teething troubles with the 787 Dreamliner.

The pressures on the supply of neodymium, dysprosium, and other rare-earth metals for the manufacture of strong magnets is leading to a surge in the use of nanotechnology to find alternatives.

Bad Science:

  1. Another idiot study about how our fists evolved in response to fighting!  An excellent takedown by  T. Ryan Gregory. “The most impressive thing about this study is that it managed to gain so much attention with so little substance”. 
  2. ChemBark has this update on serial data fabricator Bengu Sezen who has been hired by the Gebze Institute of Technology.
  3. Simon Kuper has some sympathy for Diederik Stapel who now finds himself in an unforgiving Dutch society. His take on the Stapel affaire is in the FT.
  4. The American Psychiatric Association would seem to be in thrall to the pharmaceutical industry as DSM -5 is adjusted to sell more drugs.
  5. John Hawks has a scathing post about Mark Lynas as “someone who had never read a scientific study on the subject, purporting to be an advocate in the popular press, and having his ignorant statements printed widely by multimillion-dollar media organizations” and the shoe fits whether Lynas is pontificating about GMO or global warming.
  6. Further retractions of social psychology papers: “Fraud committed by any social psychologist diminishes all social psychologists” and reinforces the view that social psychology is mainly for headlines and is still a long way from being a science.
  7. Most junior scientists accept academic theft by their advisors as a way of life and only a very few decide to make any noise about it.

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Noted in passing 5th January 2013

January 5, 2013

Wildlife gallery from Greenland: Photo: Uri Golman

A stunning gallery of wildlife pictures from Greenland.

In the ever-changing world of the web and personal computing, a reminder of the MS wrist-watch and other 10 EPIC CES fails.

Science Fraud – Another web-site silenced by legal threats and the University of Regensburg has rescinded the doctorate of a dentist who had submitted a dissertation that was essentially that of her husband’s.

A new open-access paper in Earth System Dynamics showing that recent global warming is not statistically significantly related to anthropogenic forcing. Matt Ridley has 2 interesting pieces on how fossil fuels have actually greened the planet and how Europeans seem intent on making their future as bad as they can.

A new kidney transplantation racket revealed in India where the price of a kidney varies between Rs. 70,000 and 300,000 ($1,400 to $6,000). Indian Supreme Court reacts to over 2,200 deaths in clinical trials carried out by international pharmaceutical companies in India.

Some modern humans who live natural lifestyles in the forests of Earth still climb more or less like a chimpanzee and ‘Lucy’ could climb like chimps. Jumping genes and horizontal gene transfer leads to the conclusion that cows are more closely related to snakes than to elephants!

Wallace’s letter to Darwin in 1864 doubting the assertion that the aristocracy are more beautiful than the middle-classes. Lead concentration in Greenland ice shows that when Rome fell there was a real reduction of industrial activity which lasted almost a millenium. It could be that climate change is not the great destroyer but is the great enabler and that many of the evolutionary developments of modern humans have been driven by natural – and rapid – climate change. Archaeological sleuthing sheds more light on the strange goings-on during the mutiny on the VOC Retourschip Batavia, in 1629.

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